Press conference, Adelaide

E&OE

Topics: Jobs and Skills Australia’s early childhood education and care study released.

DAVID COLTMAN, TAFE SA CEO: I’d like to firstly acknowledge the Honourable Andrew Giles MP, the Minister for Skills and Training, your new portfolio – and it’s wonderful to have you here, one of your earliest visits, so we’ll chart that up as sort of our claim to fame; the Minister the Honourable Blair Boyer, the Minister for Education, Training and Skills; the Commissioner for Jobs and Skills Australia, Professor Barney Glover; and HumanAbility CEO, Emma King. Wonderful to have you all here. And, of course, the many TAFE SA early childhood education and care students and staff members who have come along to provide some support.

This is one of our labs where students get their hands-on training. It’s a simulated environment that ensures that they’re able to be well prepared for the workforce. I won’t go into much detail about us at the moment because today isn’t our day, but I will hand over now to Professor Glover and leave it to him – no, the minister.

ANDREW GILES, MINISTER FOR SKILLS AND TRAINING: Well, thanks very much, David, and thank you, Commissioner, for giving me the opportunity to say a few words first. But I want to join you in acknowledging that we’re on the land of the Kaurna people and pay my respects to elders past, present and those who are emerging too, and extend those respects to any First Nations people who are with us today.

I’m particularly pleased to be back in Adelaide. I think I was in South Australia in my last visit as Minister for Immigration, so I’m very pleased to be back a few weeks on in this exciting role that I have in the Albanese Labor Government.

I want to join you, too, in acknowledging Commissioner Glover and the work that he does with his team at JSA; Emma King, the CEO of HumanAbility who I’ve known for a little while and I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to work with; and, of course, Minister Blair Boyer, who I’ve also known for a little while. And we had the privilege of working together quite some time ago, and I’m very excited to have hit the ground running learning a lot from you already and having the opportunity to continue to engage with you and the Malinauskas Government on some shared priorities.

Perhaps most importantly, can I acknowledge those people who are more directly engaged in the work that we’re here to talk about today – early childhood educators and those who are educating the early childhood educators.

I just want to make a very – a couple of very brief remarks that hopefully are scene-setting in terms of the report that we’re here to talk about today and how governments broadly can respond to the challenge the report presents and the opportunities that are there to be seized across our nation.

I want to also note that its particularly fitting that we’re having this event immediately before Early Childhood Educators Day, a day which we should all be celebrating, and perhaps this is a very fitting marker of – in advance of such celebration.

So there are more than 200,000 people who work in our early childhood workforce in Australia, people who work extremely hard doing absolutely everything possible to ensure that our children get the best start in life. People who know, as this government recognises, as does the Malinauskas Government, that those first five years are so fundamentally important to everyone’s life course.

We also recognise that Australian families are working hard too and parents and carers right across Australia want to be able to find high-quality early childhood education for their children. We know, too, that we need more early childhood educators now and that we will need more into the future, and that is precisely why not only did we establish Jobs and Skills Australia but we have commissioned JSA to undertake this capacity study on the workforce needs of the sector.

I note that the sector – that the study has been undertaken in partnership with HumanAbility, the relevant jobs and skills council, and I think that’s probably why you’re here. And I guess I want to also make this point: to ensure that the capacity study would show a complete and really authentic picture of workforce practice across the country, JSA has encouraged national stakeholder engagement, released consultation paper, held roundtables and broader feedback sessions. So this is a really significant piece of work which I look forward to digesting and the government responding to.

I just want to make a couple of other very brief remarks about our approach to this issue. The Australian Government and governments at state and territory level recognise the importance of quality EC delivery. It’s absolutely vital to future productivity and wellbeing and absolutely essential if we are to tackle disadvantage which persists to too great an extent across our society. And that’s why we have the place ambitious policies to provide greater access to these services. I note that states and territories are extending the reach of free preschool in various ways.

But all of these ambitious policies and attempts to expand access means that we will need a larger high-quality workforce. This is, of course, fundamentally, a human-centred activity. For it to work, for all the reasons, whether it’s about equity or about productivity, we need high-quality, well-trained staff. In particular, we need more early childhood teachers if we are to expand early preschool access relative to other educators. But the system across the board is experiencing shortages. The sector is characterised by low wages compared to comparable occupations. There are also settings that we recognise that are undermining job satisfaction, career progression opportunities and also cultural and gender inclusion. All of this affects our ability to have the sector attract and, equally importantly, retain staff.

So this study is doing exactly what JSA was designed to do – to expand upon an existing body of evidence and does so by looking at both the individual and the broader components of the workforce; the training pathways through vocational education and higher education too; the influence of the regulatory framework on training arrangements and work loads; and the funding and IR factors that impact wages across the sector. It’s a study that also addresses the really critical issues, like burnout, lack of prospects, as appreciated or as real, and workforce strain.

The last points I want to touch upon is to make clear that while this work is being undertaken by JSA together with HumanAbility, we haven’t been sitting on our hands. Change is happening. Most importantly, last month our government announced that we will fund a 15 per cent pay increase for early childhood education and care workers. This is a $3.6 billion investment which recognises the vital role that these workers play in preparing our children not just for school but for life. This will help retain existing educators who are predominantly women, of course, and also attract new workers into the sector.

Critically, we’ve also partnered with states and territories to invest over 1.5 billion to deliver fee-free TAFE places. This, of course, includes people obtaining early childhood education qualifications. Fee-free TAFE has exceeded its targets. We’re very proud that more than half a million people have enrolled since 1 January 2023 when the program rolled out. From 2024 we’ve continued to work with states and territories to roll out 320,000 places over the next three years.

Now, early childhood education and care is and will be a priority sector for fee-free TAFE. There have been almost 32,000 enrolments. This accounts for nearly 7 per cent of all fee‑free TAFE enrolments to date. Enrolments are strong in every state and territory.

And I just want to make one additional point on TAFE and early childhood education and care, because when it comes to VET, we’re doing more than just simply providing the fee‑free TAFE places. We’re putting TAFE right back at the centre of the VET sector and establishing TAFE centres of excellence right around this country. And in July the Australian and South Australian governments and Minister Boyer announced the first TAFE Centre of Excellence in earlier childhood education and care based in TAFE SA’s Adelaide city campus, David, with a joint investment of 28 million. This centre will be a skills leader in early childhood development, improving the capacity and skills of early childhood education and care workers on a national scale.

So, in conclusion, access to affordable early childhood education and care is absolutely critical to boosting productivity, to boosting workforce participation, helping Australians work more when they want to and, of course, in shaping the life course of every young Australian. To do this and do this better, we are working hard to increase the number of early childhood educators in the employment pipeline, which has seen the number of workers grow by more than 30,000 since coming to government. We have more to do if we are to achieve all of our social and economic goals in this vital sector, and I’m very confident that today’s report will provide a very sound basis to carry on that work in cooperation with our friends in the states and territories, in particular, the South Australian Labor Government. Thank you very much.

PROFESSOR BARNEY GLOVER, JOBS AND SKILLS AUSTRALIA COMMISSIONER: Thanks, Minister. It’s great to be here. Particularly great to be here with some early childhood care students and staff who are, I guess, listening to something about what their future might look like if the recommendations from today’s report in full are incorporated and accepted by government and by the industry sector more broadly. A great future ahead.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today – the Kaurna people – and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I want to acknowledge David Coltman, of course, the Chief Executive of TAFE South Australia; the Honourable Andrew Giles, the Minister for Skills an Training; the Honourable Blair Boyer, of course the South Australian Minister for Skills and Training; and I want to also acknowledge Emma King who, of course, is the Chief Executive of HumanAbility, our partner in this incredibly important capacity study we’re launching today. And to Nick and Veronica who are here with their team from the TAFE Centre of Excellence in earlier childhood education and care.

And one of the reasons JSA chose this location, not just because of early childhood day coming up, but because this is where TAFE South Australia will be hosting the National Centre of Excellence in early childhood education and care, and we wanted to be here, part of that very exciting future, and to provide an opportunity for our report to be launched today.

It’s great to have a platform, particularly I know the minister – Minister Giles has got work to do today on adult education. We need to start adult education today. We need to start it in early childhood centres around the country. It’s a critical part of understanding that life‑long journey. For most of 2023 I was privileged to be part of one of the reviews commissioned by Minister Jason Clare into tertiary education, the Universities Accord Review. And one of the recommendations from that review was to increase the participation of all Australians – in fact, 80 per cent of the working age population – to be trained in tertiary education by 2050. Quite an ambitious attainment target in tertiary education.

Two other major reviews were undertaken by the same time, by Lisa O’Brien in schools reform in this country to complete the work of the Gonski reforms in primary and secondary education, and, of course, Deborah O’Brien’s work on early childhood with the Productivity Commission. A vital set of reviews. The government has picked up the recommendation to set a very ambitious attainment target in tertiary education, but one thing is abundantly clear to Jobs and Skills Australia – and that is to attain 80 per cent of the working population with a tertiary qualification by 2050, we’ve got to start in early childhood, because it’s very clear that a young person, a child, that has access to early childhood education and care is significantly more likely to go on to tertiary education. That’s a remarkable statistic, but it starts with you in earlier childhood education and care.

So from our perspective we need not only early childhood education and care centres of high quality to ensure we reach those ambitious targets; we also need to address gender barriers and gender challenges for women to participate fully in the workforce. But you only have great early education – early childhood education and care if you have a great workforce. So we come to today’s capacity study. This is all interlinked. Earlier childhood to life-long learning is interlinked, a it is such an important day today to be launching our second capacity study. The first we completed last year at JSA in clean energy. This is the second, and I’m particularly pleased that we’ve done it in partnership with HumanAbility, one of our great jobs and skills councils – Emma will say a few words in a moment – but co-sponsored and partnered with the JSC, with the jobs and skills council responsible for this particularly important area.

One of the other characteristics of this study, like all the studies that JSA does, is that we’re a tripartite organisation. So we are about widespread consultation. We don’t just sit in Canberra and put a report together and see whether it lands in the stakeholders who are very, very interested in it; we do deep consultation with stakeholders, with unions, with government representatives, with states and territories in particular to make sure that we are on the money – and literally in this case – to support this great sector and the change that’s required in it.

So there’s been extensive consultation throughout the process. And all of that input has been taken into account in framing a very data-driven set of findings. When you have an opportunity to take this postcard and take the QR card and download the report or see the executive summary that we’re handing out today, you’ll see just how extensive this report is. Very robust set of findings and recommendations.

Now, there are some key takeaways from the report, and I just want to summarise some of them today. The substantial uplift in workforce levels that are needed to meet current and future demand. This is a growing sector. It’s going to grow dramatically over the cost of the next decade, and it must. Selfishly for Jobs and Skills Australia because we want tertiary-qualified people in the labour market – 92 per cent of jobs of the future are going to require post-secondary education. We need to get early childhood education and care right, so we’ll need a substantial uplift in the workforce. The data is there.

We need to recognise the importance of putting in place sustainable, ongoing learning and development for all staff working in early childhood education and care centres, and we need to ensure strong foundations for rewarding ECEC careers. These have to be rewarding careers. The professionalism of early childhood education and care careers is absolutely vital.

Now, Minister Giles has already spoken of some of the issues facing ECEC as a sector and also some of the responses from the federal government and states and territories. The modelling commissioned by JSA found that, quite simply, there are not enough early childhood educators. Even with over 200,000 in that workforce, this does not represent a sustainable level when you take into account some of the challenges facing that workforce – the overtime that’s required to be worked, insufficient provision for professional development.

This is an area where we need ongoing professional development. The increasing reliance on trainees to meet workforce requirements given they should ideally be balancing work with formal education, learning and reflection, and the time that more established staff are spending recruiting and onboarding new staff and providing on-the-job supervision to trainees. All of that means it’s a very challenging market for early childhood education and care, educators and workers. And the report makes a range of recommendations to address this shortage, both as we see it now but the emerging shortage over the next decade. You’ve chosen the right career path, by the way. You have chosen the right career path.

Higher wages will help. There’s no doubt about that, and we acknowledge the comments made by the minister a moment ago, with attraction and retention. The report also makes recommendations about how training and workforce settings should be improved to improve career pathways. Broadly, the existing qualifications and delivery mechanisms continue to serve the sector well. But there are some tensions and gaps that later to things like the appropriate content for the cert III in early childhood education and care, the bedrock qualification for this particular profession. The opportunities for students and workers to entry the sector in supporting roles, excluded from ratios and not working directly with children, before undertaking the cert III, and the strain arising from a large increase in cert III traineeships to meet workforce demand. Have we got the training capability to really service this increasing demand over the years to come? It’s great to see TAFE South Australia leading the way in that regard with the Centre of Excellence.

So, we need to develop pathway programs into the cert III. We need financial investment in wrap around support for existing educators. We need to give them more support in the workplace. To examine the sustainability of funding arrangements for Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and the RTOs that they lead. We want to uplift the opportunity for all Australians, particularly First Nations Australians, to have access to early childhood education and care. So we need to look at the funding arrangements for Aboriginal community-controlled organisations running RTOs. And we need to better support the sustainability of the traineeship model, including better support for on-the-job supervisors.

Now, one of the barriers we know to many people looking to build a successful career in ECEC is the low levels of remuneration and avenues to improve remuneration levels would improve the attractiveness of ECEC and improve retention and to promote more career progression. The low pay rates for diploma-qualified staff relative to cert III qualified staff is an issue. Low recognition and absence of funding for specialised roles, supporting inclusion and support for First Nations workers in many organisations. All of those elements are contributing to tension in this workforce. And as we’ve heard today, as recently announced by the Prime Minister and referenced by the minister, the government will fund a 15 per cent wage increase for ECEC workers. A vitally important component in addressing the workforce needs of the ECEC sector.

But we need to do more. All of those elements around career progression, all of those elements around professional development, all of the elements around reform of training packages, all of the elements around the career pathways, as well as recognising new pathways into qualifications in the sector are vitally important. This report goes to the heart of all of those opportunities to enhance this very, very important workforce for Australia’s future.

I’m immensely proud of the work JSA has done with HumanAbility on this capacity study. I’m confident the report’s findings and recommendations will be pivotal in shaping this workforce into the future. This is only our second capacity study and we’re continuing learning and improving with every study we deliver.

I’d like to take a second to acknowledge the time and the effort that has gone into producing this study from HumanAbility, from the many stakeholders we engaged with and who made submissions and the extraordinary staff in JSA who’ve been working on this so diligently for a year. Thank you so much to Lizzie and the people who have worked so hard to bring this to today. The final report is a tribute to all of those who participated in the process. It’s a report worth reading. It’s a report that will make a difference. I’m glad that we’re already making progress.

I’d now like to invite Emma King, the Chief Executive Officer of HumanAbility, to say a few words. Please welcome Emma.

EMMA KING, HUMANABILITY CEO: Thank you so much, Barney. And if I can also begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land that we’re on today – the Kaurna people – and pay my respects to elders past and present and to emerging leaders. I’d like to acknowledge it always was and it always will be Aboriginal land [indistinct] never ceded.

What a privilege to be here today. And if I can acknowledge Minister Giles, Minister Blair Boyer, JSA Commissioner Professor Barney Glover, TAFE SA’s Executive Director David Coltman and, of course, HumanAbility Chair as well, Rob Bonner, who’s unusually quietly sitting there in the background, for anyone who knows him well.

It is a real cause for celebration to be here today. I’m going to launch slightly off script today – sorry, Lisa – but I ran one of the early learning peaks, Early Learning Association Australia about 15 years ago, and I think we could have only dreamt of a day like today and of the capacity study such as the one that we’re launching today because we felt that we were talking about the incredible importance of early childhood education and care and the incredible jobs that you’re all about to step into and the importance of the work that you are doing, and I do remember advocating for three-year-old – free three-year-old kinder years ago and being told in the words of that great film The Castle that I was dreaming. And I look at where we are today and the fantastic investment that has been put in, the extraordinary leadership that we have at a state and federal level and the work of JSA and the work of HumanAbility and I just think what an extraordinary moment in time we have and what an extraordinary opportunity we have together.

So I’m thrilled to be here, the newly established Centre of Excellence for early childhood education and care, to launch this very significant report. And, David, to pay kudos to you, I remember when I first met with you and we were talking about the possibility of this becoming a reality, and it’s amazing to be here today and to have the opportunity to celebrate that as well.

We have been thrilled at HumanAbility to work with Jobs and Skills Australia. It has been an absolute privilege to work with the team at Jobs and Skills Australia and, of course, with you, Barney, with David, with Damian and with Lizzie and the entire team at JSA. It really – your leadership, your collaboration and your dedication to this study has been unparalleled, and for HumanAbility that’s a newly established JSC, for us to have that opportunity to work together was quite extraordinary.

I would like to also acknowledge the stakeholders who’ve worked with us throughout this journey. Professor Glover spoke about the tripartite nature of JSA. It’s the same with the jobs and skills council. And I think it speaks to the many providers, the employers, the teachers, the RTOs, the TAFEs, the peak bodies, the government and unions would have worked with us throughout this entire study as well and the generosity of people to, you know, share their insights, their knowledge and their understanding has been exceptional and an important value.

And I do really want to acknowledge that this report has been impossible – has been possible because investing in high-quality early childhood education and investing in a highly skilled workforce is the priority of the Albanese Government. I think this is evidenced when we look at the 15 per cent commitment to the uplift in wages and the fact that, Minister, you’re here today for the launch of this study as well is testament to that. And if I could echo that in my comments, Minister Boyer, to yourself. I know when we met with you – I’m trying to work out which year I’m in – earlier this year, I think, and we spoke about the importance of the early years and you provided significant support around reviewing the certificate III and the link to the diploma and your support around that was greatly appreciated as well. But we’re seeing this extraordinary coming together and real drive towards the ambition and the possibilities in this space as well.

So I’m thrilled that this report and its findings provide important insight into the workforce for the early years that we really haven’t had before other than at an anecdotal level. And I won’t repeat all of the points that you made, Barney, but I would reiterate those. And it was fantastic to have them captured in the report that we have here today.

And the minister and commissioner have already mentioned the significant amount of work and reform that’s underway in early childhood education and care which this report, I think, really contributes to and adds to as well. We also know – and it’s actually fantastic to here this because often we’ll hear about the importance of women being able to return to work, which, of course, is critically important. But we can never forget the transformative impact that high-quality early childhood education has on the lives of every single child. And it has that on the lives of every single child, but it has it particularly for those children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. So this work is paramount and delivering a high-quality workforce is paramount.

And as was also touched on earlier, looking at the work of the Productivity Commission, the employment white paper, the intergenerational report and so many other examples, we’re now seeing this highlight again and again and again. And it was about 15 years that we can think back and we really didn’t see that same level of interest and understanding, I think, in terms of the importance of the early years on both fronts – in terms of the outcomes for children but also the importance of the workforce as well.

So we’re thrilled at HumanAbility to inform and to drive the outcomes of this work because we know that it’s critical. It’s critical because every single child deserves a high-quality education. It’s critical because high-quality early childhood education transforms the lives of every child, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and that includes better economic outcomes, better health, better social and better wellbeing outcomes overall. And it’s critical because to achieve these outcomes, we need to invest in and recognise the importance of the educators in early childhood education and care.

And at the heart of the reform underway is a workforce that is valued, that is skilled, that has job and career pathway opportunities. And this is imperative to attract and retain the workforce, and it’s also what the workforce deserves. So investment in early childhood education and care workforce is an investment in the critically – in a critically important workforce and an investment in the future of every single child.

So we are thrilled to play our role with government, with TAFE, with JSA and with all of the stakeholders that we have here today and, importantly, the educators, because know that together we can drive a better future. Thank you so much.

COLTMAN: Thank you to everyone for attending. And this is an exciting time in early childhood education, and it’s an exciting time for us here at TAFE SA. As mentioned, the investment in a TAFE Centre of Excellence in early childhood education and care will see TAFE SA provide to the sector many of the responses required or mandated through this report. So we will be doing the doing, as we do. And I’m really excited about that.

It provides us the opportunity to look at how we recognise the skills of people as they enter our training, because people acquire skills outside of VET and outside of TAFE. Remarkable, but it does happen. And we need to be acknowledging that. If we look at the student cohort that’s sitting over here, these are not people who have not had life experience, many of them. And so we need to both recognise that, celebrate that, acknowledge that as part of the training process and not require them to repeat unnecessarily training that they may have done.

There’s the opportunity also for us to look at our own provision of early childhood and creche centres. We’re a significant provider here at TAFE. We have five early childhood centres and 10-ish creches, he says off the top of his head. All of those provide an opportunity for us to look at our practice to ensure that we, too, are moving as we take the sector in both the investment and our staff, the recognition of that capability and the importance of those centres not just for the students that may be using them or the community that may be using them but for our community as a whole.

So it’s a fantastic time to be in early childhood. Some of you may know, many years ago I trained to be a [indistinct] teacher, so I have some knowledge of this sector. I didn’t stay for long, though. Perhaps that might be a good thing.

But, yes, I will now hand over to – if there are any questions that you’d like to target to our colleagues, that would probably be better than [indistinct].

JOURNALIST: Just talk us through the demand and how we are going to increase the supply [indistinct].

GILES: Yeah, look, I might get the commissioner to talk a little bit about what his report tells us about current and future demand. What the government recognises is that while we have more than 200,000 workers in this workforce right now, that’s not enough for today and it’s certainly not enough when it comes to the ambitions we have for a high-quality early childhood care and education sector. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve invested more than $3.6 billion in a wage increase, to encourage people to think about the sector and to think about staying in the sector if they’re there already.

We’ve done so much work through the employment white paper, through the work of the Productivity Commission and, of course, the work that we’re here to talk about today, to better understand some of the pressures on the sector. Importantly, we’ve opened up fee-free TAFE, and that’s enabled so many people that I’ve met with already to think about at various stages of their life – from school leavers to people who are at my age and sometimes even a little bit older – to think about having a punt on a career they may have always been interested in but never felt they had the opportunity to do.

So it’s not about looking for a silver bullet; it’s about understanding how this workforce operates, how important it is, whether you look at it from an equity lens – the sort of society we want to live in – or from an economic and productivity lens – how do we maintain the sort of standards of living we want to see – it’s absolutely vital that we sustain a workforce that will support high-quality education and care, that’s affordable for every Australian family but also which enables every Australian child to have the best start in their life.

Commissioner, I don’t know if you want to talk about –

GLOVER: Just very, very briefly – sorry, thank you. Very briefly to say this report is all about addressing this question of how we build the supply side is because at the moment it’s very clear we have demand that’s not being met. And we need people who are underemployed – women, in particular – that would like to be employed more in the workforce, but they need access to more child care. We need more childcare workers.

We’ve got a problem with the occupations that are in the high levels of churn. We have people coming in and out. It’s not holding people, not retaining people in the workforce. We’ve got to make it a more attractive career path for young people to enter, which means remuneration that the minister has just referred to, that’s a vital part of it, career pathways, very important part of it, addressing some of the professional development requirements are critical. These are the things that this particular workforce is telling Jobs and Skills Australia and our jobs and skills council that they need. This will keep more people in the profession, less attrition, plus great opportunity to attract more people in. And I think then we’ll meet some of these targets which are going to grow dramatically over the next decade and beyond in early childhood. And, as I said earlier, we need this vitally to address all of the other targets in our labour force over the next 25 years.

JOURNALIST: And we got a little bit about burnout being an issue in the profession. How is that going to be addressed with these findings?

GLOVER: Do you want to comment on that?

KING: Thank you. In terms of things like burnout, we know that it’s really critical that we truly invest in the workforce. Part of that is having the amount of staff that we actually need who are able to deliver high-quality early childhood education and care. And then looking at other areas such as professional support, professional development. And one of the challenges that we are seeing because we do have critical workforce shortages, which are in part due to the fact that we’ve got this incredibly ambitious reform from governments across the country to really uplift the amount of high-quality early childhood education and care and delivering it to children at earlier points in their life. So much of the issues what we’re facing as well is being seen by this extraordinarily ambitious vision, and I think we have to collectively look at how do we step up, how do we value a workforce that perhaps hasn’t traditionally been valued in the way that it should and it needs to be, and then how do we make sure that we’ve got the sort of preconditions in place so that we can avoid burnout and, instead, actually really value a profession that we know is really critical, because we know that it truly transforms the trajectory of every single child who is engaged the high-quality early learning. So it’s such an important thing to do.

JOURNALIST: Yeah, and you spoke a little bit about the outcomes for children who are engaged in early childhood education.

KING: Yes.

JOURNALIST: Can you explain a little bit more about the benefits of that?

KING: Absolutely. It’s actually a no-brainer. When you look at every child who starts school from behind, the reality is they don’t catch up unless there’s really concerted intervention. So we know that we need to invest and invest heavily in our children at the earliest stages possible. We’ve seen huge investment in three-year-old kinder and four‑year-old kinder for children. We also know it comes back to high-quality early education before that as well. But the research is in. There’s Nobel Prize winning research that shows a significant difference in terms of economic, health, social and wellbeing outcomes for every single child who is involved in high-quality early childhood education. So having this report today, making this a priority of government at state and territory and federal level, it’s such an opportunity and one that we really have to get behind and fully invest in.

JOURNALIST: And you said that it was particularly important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

KING: That’s right.

JOURNALIST: [Indistinct].

KING: Yeah, for children from disadvantaged – so it’s important for all children. It makes a different to every child irrespective of the background that they come from. But the research shows unequivocally that it makes the biggest difference for children who are from disadvantaged backgrounds because otherwise their life outcomes aren’t as good. So – and, again, that comes across economic, social, health, wellbeing. So it covers the broad trajectory of a person’s life, and it makes the biggest difference for disadvantaged children.

JOURNALIST: And there’s also been some research into better working with children from diverse backgrounds and children with disabilities and children who are [indistinct]. Talk me through the findings there.

KING: Absolutely. I’ll start on it and then I’ll hand over to Professor Glover as well. But we know from many children, particularly, for example, people who are arriving from other countries, children with disabilities et cetera, they haven’t always been given the same opportunity at high-quality early learning opportunities that they should have been given. We know that sometimes there can be – we need to be really careful in terms of making sure that we’ve got high-quality workforce that understands the many different children who will come into early childhood settings and beyond and to think about how we tailor our learning and learning outcomes for those high­-quality outcomes as well. So we have children, of course, who cut across – if you think about the number of children and in number of people across Australia who have disabilities, we need to make sure that every single early learning environment is truly inclusive, can truly cater for needs of every child because, again, it will make such a big difference in their outcomes.

But I’ll hand over to Professor Glover to speak specifically –

GLOVER: You’ve done a very good job, Emma. Look, I think as Emma indicated – and the report touches on this – if we want to make a difference to the lives of all young people we’ve got to beginning by acknowledging just how important diversity is and to be inclusive in our early childhood education and care centres, make sure our workforce is ready to support young children from a variety of backgrounds, and they will in some cases come in neurodiverse, with a range of cultural and linguistic challenges, but that adds to the richness to early childhood education and care. We need the workforce ready to address those challenges and support those students. And one of those young people – one of the bits of data I quoted earlier is so important to this country. We know that 92 per cent of jobs within a decade with going to require post-secondary education. Well, we’re not going to get there unless we have young children in early childhood education and care with quality workforce in quality environments, because they’re twice as likely to actually go into tertiary education. We need to start now.

JOURNALIST: And so when will we start to see those findings be implemented?

GLOVER: Minister, I know you’ve already commented on that.

GILES: Yeah, look, I might just build a bit on what Emma and Barney were just saying and all of things that they’ve just said in response to your last question go to the ambition the government has, from the Prime Minister down, about transforming this sector so that we can transform the lives of every Australian. I think the Prime Minister’s first substantial commitment in a policy sense as Opposition Leader was about a really big vision for early childhood education and care and making sure it reaches every Australian. It’s important to note that this is a cost-living measure as well as all the other objectives that we’ve been talking about now, whether it’s about the shape of the economy today and into the future, whether it’s about those equity considerations too.

In terms of this report, well, we’re launching it today. I’m pleased to take it on board. I’d make two points about it: one is that some of the things that the report suggests that we should think about doing we are already doing. It’s worth noting, and that’s no criticism o the report – we only made our decision on the wage increase last month. The report, I think it’s fair to say, you’d done your work before then.

Some of the other matters obviously require proper consideration, and that’s, I guess, the last point that I really want to make about the work that I do, the importance of doing it with JSA and the JSC is and with state and territory governments. Everything we do in the skills and training space as a national government is done through partnerships. Everything that we do well depends on the quality of those partnerships between different levels of government, between expert agencies and between all industry partners. It’s so much important that this report brings together both the desktop data that’s really critical to frame some of the questions but also the experiences – the experiences of industry partners, be they employers, be they governments, be they unions and, most importantly, workers and future workers. Bringing all those together, looking at the report, that’s what I’m determined to do in the coming weeks and months.

JOURNALIST: And you mentioned cost of living. Is this going to help make early childhood more affordable for consumers?

GILES: Well, fundamentally that’s got to be part of our approach. We’ve got to make sure that early childhood education is available and affordable around the country. That’s what we are determined to do. Workforce is a really critical part of that piece. Thanks very much.